Fall in Love with Five Features of Adobe Target

Image source: Adobe Stock / by NLshop.

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, which is right around the corner, I wanted to share a little love for five great features and capabilities of Adobe Target that are available right “out of the box” so to speak. These are powerful features that you may be overlooking or just not fully appreciating.

Feature 1: The ability to augment the Target Visitor ID with third-party or first-party data

Adobe Target gives you a visitor profile associated with a unique Visitor ID for each of your visitors. This profile contains anonymized data that Adobe Target collects about the visitor, including their device type, geolocation, and many other attributes. You can use that data to create audiences and target experiences to visitors. (Review this page in the online help to learn what attributes Adobe Target captures.)

What you may not know is that Adobe Target provides a mechanism for marrying this visitor ID to the unique ID for each visitor in your first-party systems like your CRM or loyalty program, or to a third-party data source. By doing this, you can augment the visitor profile via that ID with data from other sources. With Adobe Target, you can pass a third-party parameter—the ID from your first or third-party system—to the page, where Adobe Target picks it up. Then all that data from the system can be used in Target.

If you’re selling software in the B2B space, that means you can tie the ID for each prospect from your CRM system to know how many times sales has contacted the visitor. That can lead to all types of different personalized interactions via the website. But if you’re a B2C company like a retailer, you can tie purchase or loyalty data to personalize offers to someone who, for example, tends to buy anniversary gifts in a specific month or always uses the gift-wrapping option.

Learn more about getting data into and out of Adobe Target in this post by Ram Parthasarathy.

Feature 2: The ability to define visitor behaviors as you need

Adobe Target provides incredible flexibility for defining audiences based on their behavior—for example, visitors who searched for rugs, added something to a cart but didn’t purchase, or have account balances of a certain level. You can go into the user-friendly Adobe Target user interface to define audiences however you want.

On the surface, this seems so basic, but this ability is incredibly valuable. You can create a test and target it to everyone who searched for rugs to find out the experiences or offers they respond to best. You can re-engage customers who might be on the verge of a purchase by retargeting individuals who left something in their cart.

There’s even more that you can do here. Target lets you capture visitor affinity for a specific category of products, like men’s clothing, or content, like business articles based on the category of pages he or she visits most often. You can use that affinity to target visitors with experiences based on those expressed interests. Learn more about using category affinity for targeting in the online help.

So many possibilities here for creating audiences for targeting.

Feature 3: All your critical testing and personalization tools, plus Auto-Allocate

As a marketer or product owner, you’re already familiar with the basics of A/B and multivariate testing and experience targeting. These capabilities are table stakes for your organization. What you may not be using or know about is Auto-Allocate.

Auto-Allocate is an AI-driven feature that you simply turn on by clicking a radio button in the second step of the workflow for setting up an A/B test. It lets you mitigate risk by diverting more traffic to the winning experience as the test runs. It suppresses underperforming experiences, and lets you capitalize more on the winning experience. A good time to use it is when you have multiple versions of an experience and want Target to quickly deliver the best one.

By the way, if you try Auto-Allocate and find that it helped you notably increase conversions and revenue, you may want to try out the AI-driven personalization features—Auto-Target, Recommendations, and Automated Personalization.

You can learn more about the different types of automation in Adobe Target by reviewing this one-page document: Adobe Target Automation Powered by Adobe Sensei.

Feature 4: Geo-targeting and mobile device targeting

Adobe Target captures data about visitors that can be super useful for targeting test and personalized experiences. To name just a few, it captures time zone, ZIP code, latitude and longitude coordinates, common browsers and operating systems, ISP, connection speed, and IP address.

Here’s what a few companies have done with a few of these attributes: One major technology company targeted users on older operating systems with the suggestion that it might be time to purchase a new laptop, along with some offers for new laptops. A telco used information about who the cellular service provider was from mobile device visitors and targeted them with an experience that included positive quotes from people who switched from the visitor’s carrier to this carrier. Many retail stores can use GPS to personalize offers and “My Store” selections to people based on their GPS location.

Think of all the ways for using this information in your Adobe Target activities.

Feature 5: The unified Experience Cloud ID

One of the most valuable capabilities you get with Adobe Target results from its being part of Adobe Experience Cloud. That’s the ability to use the Experience Cloud ID (ECID). Think of this supercharging your Target visitor profile. With this unique ID, you can connect to and leverage any data about the visitor in any Experience Cloud solution you use—Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Audience Manager. In Adobe Target, you can create testing and personalization activities using detailed historical segments created in Analytics and data-rich audiences created in Audience Manager.

If you’re a member of the Adobe Device Co-op, the ECID can provide another benefit. It can make it easier and more automated for your visitors to see consistent Adobe Target experiences no matter which device they use to visit your website—even without your visitor authenticating. That’s because the ECID and the Device Co-op can help identify the visitor as the same person when they visit your site from their different devices. They do this by leveraging a shared pool of devices that have been contributed to the co-op by many leading brands, and matching the visitor’s IP address with any devices associated with that IP address that are in the pool. Learn more about how the Device Co-op does this matching by reviewing this topic in the online help.

That device matching can enable this type of customer experience:

A visitor wanting to make reservations for a Valentine’s Day dinner reviews a restaurant on her smart phone while on the commuter train to work. She gets targeted with an offer for a special Valentine’s day dinner. On her lunch break later that day, when she opens the restaurant website to make her reservation, Target recognizes her as the same person and delivers her that same offer to continue the experience.

So many reasons to love Adobe Target

I hope you’ve discovered something new to strengthen your affection for Adobe Target. There’s so much to love here that we sometimes overlook some of the basic, but most powerful capabilities this leading optimization and personalization solution offers.

By the way, it’s not too late to reserve that table for Valentine’s Day. It’s also not too late to register for attending Adobe Summit in Las Vegas (or in London) or submit your personalization success story for a chance to win an Experience Maker award and present it at Summit!